It is 10 o’clock on a snowy morning in east London, and the wind section is warming up – Mozart, Brahms and Ibert are on the bill. Ibrihim, a chubby-cheeked six-year-old sitting in the audience, is excited. 'This is the best performance ever,’ he shouts, jumping up and down before the music has even started. 'It makes me want to dance.’ His teacher tries to shush him gently, but the conductor is not concerned about concert hall etiquette. Instead he comes striding over, takes Ibby by the hand and lets him conduct, guiding his arms in time with the music as the performance starts.

Ibby is more than just a lively six-year-old; he has autism, as do his 20 or so classmates in the hall of the Phoenix school in Bow. The school has 149 pupils, aged from three to 19, all of whom have behavioural needs within the autistic spectrum, and varying levels of language and communication difficulties. Children file into the hall wearing brightly coloured noise-reduction headphones (background noise is upsetting for some autistic children); others have books hanging around their necks, with pictures of objects and commands for them to point to: I want a drink; I need to go to the toilet (the staff wear a set of commands too). The hall is noisy, but as soon as the music starts the transformation is instant. One five-year-old who seconds ago was running around shrieking now lies starfish-like on a mat, blissfully flapping his arms and legs in time to Mozart’s Divertimento No 11.

The music is being performed by three members of theOrchestra of St John’s, an internationally renowned ensemble founded 45 years ago by the conductor John Lubbock, while he was at the Royal Academy of Music. The OSJ has played at the Royal Albert Hall, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Carnegie Hall in New York, and stages about 30 performances each year for the paying public. But alongside this it spends 40 days a year at schools such as the Phoenix, playing to children who have autism. Over 11 years the OSJ has performed for more than 35,000 autistic children. In the UK there are 106,000 school children with autism, according to the National Autistic Society, including 61,570 in the state system.

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'Who wants to come up next?’ Lubbock, 68, a tall man with a white beard, booms. Hands instantly shoot up. He leads the children up, one by one, hovering protectively as he encourages them to conduct. No behaviour is forbidden. Running around the hall or hiding in corners is allowed. Dancing is positively encouraged. Children who don’t want to participate don't have to. Lubbock hands out brightly coloured ribbons to the still-seated children. 'It’s wonderful that they allow the pupils to respond to the music in their own way,’ Paula Manning, the director of expressive arts at the Phoenix says. 'Sometimes a child really needs to get up and run around, and most people don’t understand that – they think they’re just behaving badly, which means we can’t take the children on trips to traditional concerts. So it’s wonderful that this incredible orchestra can come to us.’ This is the OSJ’s first time at the Phoenix, a visit arranged by the music department.

The school performances are always led by Lubbock and include various musicians from his 100-strong orchestra. Today three smartly dressed members of the wind section carry on unflinchingly even when one child, excited by the jazzy parts of Ibert’s Cinq Pièces en Trio, spins in circles ever closer to the bassoonist. Lubbock bounds over and turns him in a different direction. Another boy runs up and halts abruptly in front of the clarinet player, Julian Farrell. The child stands and stares at the large silver keys for the remainder of the piece.

'It’s wonderful,’ Farrell, who has played the clarinet with the OSJ for 35 years, says. 'We play Brahms to an audience of 400 middle-class people and you get stony faces until the end, when they break out into a polite clap. Here you can see the effect of the music on the children immediately – they laugh and dance or lie down and relax, depending on the piece, which is exactly how music is meant to make you feel.’ In a break Farrell, the bassoon player Gavin McNaughton and the oboist Chris O’Neal discuss the 'pieces’ (really just three-minute snippets) that the children seem to enjoy most. Farrell says that anything in 2/4 time 'grabs them rhythmically’; McNaughton feels that music with a quick three-time bounce elicits the best response.

Tambir Uddin, 16 . Photo: Laura Pannack

'The musicians love it – that’s something that touches me very deeply,’ Lubbock says. 'They take it very seriously. They rehearse, talk about it, and play with total solemnity. They could just play the notes, but they understand that only the best will do.’

Lubbock has a natural empathy with the children. Even though some carers are sure the children won’t go up to conduct (typically children with autism shy away from social contact), the majority of the child­ren accept his invitation. 'Some people can be very tense if they’re not used to disability,’ he says, 'and the child­ren pick up on that instantly. But I’m not scared of these children; I have one at home.’

Lubbock’s fifth and youngest son, Alexander, was diagnosed with autism when he was two. He had been a 'happy, smiling baby’, but almost overnight he changed. In an extraordinary 1998 documentary made by Channel 4 (filmed over two years) there is a haunting scene in which Alexander throws himself on and off a chair, all the while screaming. No one is able to comfort him. As Lubbock’s wife, Christine Cairns, says on film, 'he has just disappeared’.

The Lubbocks’ desperation led them to try a controversial and expensive therapy (it was to pay the £12,000 annual cost that Lubbock invited cameras into his home) developed in the 1980s in America, called the Lovaas method, which they had read about. It involved therapists coming to their home in Oxfordshire (including a head trainer from California for a weekend), five hours a day, five days a week, painstakingly teaching Alexander to communicate by copying increasingly complicated actions. After 12 weeks they started to teach him to say his name. A month later Alexander had learnt to say good morning and good night to his parents. And after five months of therapy he started going to playgroup one morning a week. The therapy continued for three years. 'They stopped because they had achieved a stage that many others take six to seven years to get to,’ Lubbock says.

Lubbock and Cairns had to change their lives to care for Alexander. As well as Lubbock’s conducting commitments, Cairns had an international career as a mezzo soprano. But as soon as Alexander was diagnosed, both gave up touring to look after him. 'In our business once you stop travelling your career stops,’ Lubbock says. Cairns started teaching music, and Lubbock took over the management of his orchestra (as well as conducting), and restricted their concerts to venues within easy reach of home.

They also founded their charity, Music for Autism in 2001, when Alexander was seven. At first they produced concert recordings, raising money to fund already-existing autism projects. After a year, Lubbock says, 'we decided we’d bring music to these kids’, and they started to perform in special schools. The concerts cost about £1,000 a day in musician and transport fees (his own time is free), but Lubbock uses private donations and grants to cover the costs, rather than charge the schools. 'So many schools have begged me to come back once a week because the music provides such a relief to these children,’ he says, 'but sadly we just can’t afford it.’ As well as Music for Autism, Lubbock organises concerts for dementia patients, and has recently started a choir at Huntercombe prison in Oxfordshire. 'These guys have plenty of time,’ he says. 'And energy. And singing is the most wonderful therapy.’

Alexander, now 19, has never been to one of his father’s concerts ('he’s the only autistic child in Oxford not to,’ Lubbock mutters) because, like any teenager might, he finds it embarrassing to see his father on stage. But the therapy he had as a toddler enabled him to interact with his family again – 'it saved him,’ Lubbock says simply. He has not made eye contact with Lubbock since he was two, and as a child used to run backwards to greet his father when he came home from work, desperate to make contact but unable to handle the intensity of looking at his face. But Alexander can now communicate well and is an active part of the family. 'He doesn’t speak like everyone else,’ Lubbock says. 'He uses the most wonderful phrases that show the beauty of the autistic mind. When he was little he would say, “I’ve got an idea, let’s go nowhere together,” to mean, let’s hang out. I just loved it.’

Alexander still needs 24-hour supervision and always will – there is no known cure for autism. But he now attends a local day centre (where Lubbock is a trustee) and has the occasional sleepover at his eldest brother’s house. But he will probably never have a job – only 15 per cent of adults with autism in the UK are in full-time paid employment, despite 61 per cent saying they would like to work, according to the National Autistic Society. 'He could run a library entirely in his head – he loves to reorganise books at the centre,’ Lubbock says. 'But I doubt anyone will give him the chance to have a job because he finds dealing with strangers hard. I do worry for him as we get older; I worry for all of these children I see. Who is going to look after them?’

The staff at the Phoenix are hands-on, and they sit hugging, stroking and soothing their charges while the trio perform. To give his musicians a quick break, Lubbock gets out his 'toys’ – two sensors that look like microphones and three brightly coloured pads that use sound-beam technology to turn the children’s movements into ambient sounds (the whole kit costs £4,000, paid for by a donor). The sensitivity can be turned up or down, depending on the child – for children unable to move, a blink of an eyelid can produce a sound. Farrell talks about a recent concert when a little girl who could only move her right arm in jerky, uncontrolled motions was using the machine. 'You could see in her eyes the moment she discovered that she could control the sound,’ he says. 'Her face just shone. You could see it was the only time she had controlled something in her whole life.’

Lubbock conducting with Minhaj Sadik, 14. Photo: Laura Pannack

Patrick, a 10-year-old in combat trousers, doesn’t quite understand it and starts rapping into the microphone-shaped sensor. But Norah, 13, a tall, silent girl, works out that as she moves her hand strange sounds happen. Next she experiments with facial expressions, blowing out her cheeks and sucking them in. The children are soon absorbed. 'The brilliant thing is that they’re making music together,’ Clare Hanney, the music coordinator at the Phoenix, says. As a peal of ethereal sounds fills the hall 10-year-old Ahmed leads a cohort of breakdancers. 'I’ve never seen Ahmed get up and dance before,’ Hanney says, beaming.

'One of the reasons I love doing this is that there is such joy in these schools and the staff are so caring,’ Lubbock says. 'Every tiny increment of improvement is a massive celebration; there is no failure. You can’t ever fail. In what other part of life could you say that?’

After lunch some sixth-formers file in. Watching a parade of enormous 19-year-old men (and it is mostly men; boys are three to four times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with autism, although this is now changing), you see the challenges the carers face. When a 5ft 7in 15-year-old girl who cannot speak throws herself on the mat at the end of the session and refuses to leave, her carer can do nothing except point again and again to the set of picture commands around his neck – time to go to class. It takes two hours to get her up.

Next two 15-year-olds, Anthony and Dami, decide to volunteer together. Dami immediately gets into the rhythm, while Anthony shoots sideways glances at him, trying to copy. Their teacher, Paula Manning, is astonished. 'Anthony is the more confident one of the pair; Dami is less verbal. But look at them – Anthony is taking his cues from Dami, and this is levelling them.’ Afterwards Anthony is breathless with excitement. 'It was like being a magician,’ he says as Dami grins. 'I felt very calm. Like relaxing on the sea.’

Sam Thomson, 15 . Photo: Laura Pannack

It is the final session of the day – the musicians have been playing for four hours now in sessions of 40 minutes. There is a mixture of ages in the hall, and the children seem at their most relaxed and expressive. Norah, the tall girl from the sound beam session, comes back in. Almost immediately she gets up and starts moving, a slow, graceful almost balletic dance. 'I don’t know whether there are any long-term effects when we play to them,’ Lubbock says. 'But you can instantly see the short-term ones. Music releases them from some of the autistic chains that tie them down; you can just see them falling off.’ Just then Emily, 17, a new girl at the school who, Hanney says, has not interacted with her class before, starts a wonderfully expressive dance using her scarf. 'The children often have a delayed response,’ Hanney explains. 'It can take them a while to process what has happened.’

Afterwards I ask the musicians what the highlight of their day has been. O’Neal, eyes glistening, says immediately, 'The dancing. Wasn’t that fantastic? I have a two-year-old daughter who dances every time my 11-year-old plays the piano. The girls reminded me of her.’

'There are often a lot of tears after these concerts,’ Lubbock says. 'You see grown men sitting in their cars afterwards, blubbing like babies. It’s terribly touching. I’m always exhausted after these sessions – when I get in the car I have to struggle to keep my eyes open because there is so much emotion in the air. I look at the children and I know what their parents are going through and I know the struggle those children have every day just to survive.’ It’s a struggle he knows only too well.

The Orchestra of St John’s is performing at St John’s Smith Square, London SW1, May 30 (osj.org.uk).